atmaspheric | endeavors

The chief executives of Friendster and two similar networking Web sites are commonly thought of as friends. All three–Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, in Mountain View, Calif.; Marc Pincus of Tribe.net, in San Francisco; and Jonathan Abrams, of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Friendster–invested early in Friendster, and all began their various networking sites with the understanding that the [...]

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Cablevision said Tuesday that it now offers Internet phone service to all of its cable broadband customers, giving it one of the largest potential markets for commercial voice over Internet protocol service in the United States.
As of Tuesday, the company’s $35-a-month Optimum Voice dialing plan is available to 1 million high-speed Internet [...]

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Yet another Treo review…
In his first review for Mobile Burn, Marcelo Lopez gives us the low-down on one of this year’s hottest devices, the Handspring Treo 600. While not quite perfect, it addresses many of the Treo 270/300’s issues. [Mobile Burn]

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I believe I’ve mentioned how much I want the Treo 600…
One issue I have, is that in order to get it with T-Mobile (they have a great $20/all you can eat data plan) I will have to get a different phone to start out with in time to maintain my existing mobile number which I [...]

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NBC Faults Nielsen for Reduction in Viewers
NBC asserted that the falloff in young male viewers this television season was caused by new participants in the Nielsen survey who are not following the right procedures. [New York Times: Business]
NBC claims that adding Hispanics to the survey has had a negative impact on ratings as they (Hispanics) [...]

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Microsoft Research is looking at how to leverage blogs, RSS feeds, Wikis and other social-networking tools. [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]

…Wallop doesn’t seem to fit into any one existing software category. While part of the application is a blogging tool, it also includes other “social networking” software.” It builds off of several existing [...]

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The agency issues an order that requires all landline phone companies to allow customers to transfer their numbers to cell phones when signing up for new services. [CNET News.com]

The FCC has required porting for several years, but the telephone industry has managed through lawsuits and other tactics to delay any firm deadline. Monday’s order clarifies [...]

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MotionApps has a set of utilities for Treo Smartphones….

mSafe lets you lock your Treo via SMS should it be lost of stolen.
mRIng lets you set different ring tones per person in your address book.
mLights controls the backlight in the keyboard so you can save battery power during the day.

Look good - I’ll definitely want to [...]

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Is it a coincidence that the 20th anniversary of the computer virus and Microsoft Windows are so close?

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Verizon posted a press release with tips and some expectations…It’s Verizon focused but does have some good general info.

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Sony plays new copy-protection song
The company touts a forthcoming CD technology that prevents users from copying songs to file-sharing sites but lets them make copies for themselves. [CNET News.com]
I’m sure this won’t be the last time digital media is encoded with single player player capability, but it just seems ridiculous to me that a) if [...]

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The Giga Pocket PCVA-HVP20 Personal Video Player has a 3.5-inch LCD screen, a 20GB hard drive, and play Windows Media, MPEG1, and MPEG2 video files (where’s support for MPEG4 and DivX?). [Gizmodo]
Looks good… hopefully will make it to the US. I’d love to see larger drives available as well. Wonder what kind of [...]

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Are the carriers really not ready for Wireless Portability or is this a decided passive aggressive protest. I’ve seen two reports now - one from cellular news and the other from eWeek suggesting the carriers are not ready.
As you may or not recall, there was little if any penalty for not meeting the e911 [...]

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Comcast Cable is set to announce that it will offer the Rhapsody online music service from RealNetworks to its nearly 5 million subscribers. [New York Times: Business]

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I’ve been clearing out quite a few spam messages allegedly from a site called cardercrew which is being abused as a joe job. Here’s a list of what you might consider buying from these guys…

Heroin, in liquid and crystal form.
Rocket fuel and Tomahawk rockets (serious enquiries only).
Other rockets (Air-to-Air), orders in batches of [...]

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Good stuff from Derrick Story at O’Reilly on taking better shots.
You’ve heard this before: Digital cameras do all the work. You just push the button and great pictures magically appear. The better the camera, the better the photos. Isn’t that right? Heck no!

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They’re hoping in 2006 to be where we were in Jaguar, basically. That’s what they’re hoping. Obviously we’re going to have a few more releases before 2006 so we’d be way ahead of them by then. But that’s what they’re hoping for, and maybe they’ll do that. They have a lot of people to work [...]

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Spent some time checking out the lunar eclipse tonight… Fortunately we had a great view right from our window on this crisp fall evening. The shots are far from my best work (as if I was a pro), but give a good sequential overview of the events.

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As an administrator, when you think of automating tasks, you naturally think of scripting. James Reynolds shows you how to apply a variety of scripting languages to automate your workflow on Mac OS X. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]

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The process starts at the check-in desk, where a baggage tag with an RFID chip and antenna imbedded in it will be printed out and attached to each bag. Each tag will carry a unique identifier and will be read while the bag is transported on conveyors through the appropriate explosive-screening machine and onto the [...]

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